Welcome to X-Shops - a specialist in e-commerce site rental

We specialise in fully supported e-commerce solutions.
Our philosophy is simple: Let the customer run his/her business and we will manage the technology.
We do not believe that trading online should be difficult, expensive or time consuming.

How We Started

We are experienced programmers, coding on a number of desktop and web technologies.
We initially started e-commerce as a project to attract additional revenue streams.
In order to make our lives as easy as possible, we wrote a windows based front end to manage our orders.
Today, the software has evolved into a fully functional e-commerce front end.
The user has access to orders, can update status, search for orders, print invoices and even push the order onto couriers systems.

Where Are We Now?

We operate multiple shops for ourselves and our clients.
Our dedicated servers each serve a limited number of shops (typically six) ensuring a fast, reliable response for the customer.
As we setup, maintain and configure these servers ourselves,
all e-commerce shops benefit from multiple backups which are copied to our dedicated backup server and then to local storage.

We have many additional facilities such as automatic currency updates for those users who wish to display prices in alternative currency,
a site counter where the number of users online in shown in a small desktop app, a mobile web app for current sales status,
live chat facilities complete with desktop client (A Shopfront Module), text (SMS) facilities, easy mail list management and much, much more.

Our own in-house e-commerce sites include Dickie Bows.
Check it out for an example of how x-cart performs on a mobile or tablet.

Our Packages

We offer three e-commerce packages,
basic,
themed and
custom.
The difference only relates to the type of setup and the style of template (skin) available.
Our main e-commerce package has all the essentials to trade online,
although a few optional extras are available for example: multiple domains, dedicated IP address, SSL certificate (site padlock), etc.

What is included in the rental package?

Your monthly rental package includes:

Your own 'co.uk' domain name

Comprehensive backups with multiple copies

Database optimised and maintained

Day to day support for package related software

Immediate help by phone, mail, live chat or dedicated messenger client

Optimisation and Initial Sales

We optimise our own sites rather than use an SEO agency.
We offer to train our customers to optimise each individual product as it is added to their catalogue.
As a result of this approach, many of our customer's search terms are on page one of Google.
Click here,
here and
here
to view British Braces position in Google.

Usually because of the superior product knowledge, the trained customer is better equipped to optimise the text on an e-commerce site.
Keywords are used in context providing a positive experience for the buyer and better results on Google.
The best result from an SEO agency come from establishing backlinks from other sites and publishing relevant articles that
can highlight your products and simultaneously provide backlinks.

We are only too aware that many companies selling online use Google Adwords.
This service can be very effective, however it can also prove extremely expensive even when properly managed.
All too often online stores use Adwords matched against search terms which have actually made the first page on Google.
The end result is that sales happen, Google earns well, but profits suffer.

Our approach is to offer an easy to use keyword monitoring tool as part of our customer control panel.
This allows the customer to manage Adwords and subsequently remove Adwords marketing once a specific search term has reached a targeted position on Google.
Usually, we advise using Adwords only to kickstart initial sales and
we are quite happy to manage the Adwords campaign on the customer's behalf or work with the customer on the Adword's campaign.

What else do we offer?

As we also offer PC support, some customers also opt for contracted PC support as well.
This makes life easy for the user - if they need help with their PC, simply call us whatever the problem.